as white sand begins to touch the bottom of an hourglass.
6 Entelechy
Placing long-stemmed sunflowers in a vase
or staring at a map of Paris
may be a form of ripening.
In the garden, red-leaf lettuce has bolted in the heat.
The surface of water in an old whiskey barrel
twitches with mosquito larvae.
A bingo billboard on a highway
may be a momentary rippling,
but the deeper undulation is shark-womb skin.
Slicing abalone on the counter,
I catch a tidal surge at my fingertips.
By candlelight, a yellow cosmos,
koi roiling the surface of a stream into gold flecks,
your sharp wild cries.
7 Apache Plume
Climbing out of an arroyo, I reach my hand
into a small cactus and see the taro
plant in the backyard unfurl a new leaf.
A great horned owl perched on a ledge
twitches its ears when we approach along
the bottom of a ravine. I spot a hummingbird
at the hollyhock, pear blossoms swirling
on gravel near the gate. When you light
a candle, the flickering shadow on the wall
has the shape of an eagle feather.
In the morning when you do a yoga stretch,
I feel the rhythm with which you sway—
fingertip to fingertip, mouth to mouth,
the shifting course of the Pojoaque River,
white apache plume blossoming to silvery puff.
And as an astronomer catches light echoes
from a nova, when I pull spines out of my palm,
I know this instant moment which is ours.
8 Anamnesis
Wind erases our footprints on a transverse dune.
A yellow yolk of sun drops below the horizon
as a white moon rises. Claret cup cactus
blooms in white sand, while soaptree yuccas
move as a dune moves. The mind reduces a pond
to a luminous green speck and enlarges
a flecked Amanita muscaria cap into a cosmos.
Running my hand along the curve of your waist,
I wonder if knowledge is a form of anamnesis.
When I pour warm water down your spine,
a Boletus barrowsii releases spores into air.
As a stone drops into a pool and red koi
swim toward the point of impact, we set
a yarrow stalk aside and throw Duration,
glimpse a spiral of bats ascending out of a cave;
one by one they flare off into indigo air.
9 Starlight
Here skid marks on I-25 mark a head-on collision;
here I folded an origami crane;
here a man writes in grass style: huan wo he shan;
here black poplar leaves swayed on the surface of clearest water;
here a downy woodpecker drills high in the elm;
here a dog drags a horse’s leg back from the arroyo;
here Keene’s cement burned into my wrist and formed a riparian scar;
here, traveling at night through the Sonoran Desert,
everyone choked when sand swept through the open windows of the train;
here yellow and red ranunculus unfold under a chandelier;
here in the Jemez Mountains a cluster of Clitocybe dilatata;
here we spot eleven dolphins swimming between kelp beds up the coast;
here we look through binoculars at the blue ion tail of a comet in the northwest sky;
here pelicans are gliding above a cliff;
here when I pour water down the drain, a black cricket pops up;
here the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes
was a cut peony in a glass;
here is the origin of starlight.
10 Diffraction Grating
Sipping kava out of a tea bowl,
I am descending into a cavern that inhales
and exhales once each day. I see an alula
in a tropical greenhouse, the tracks
a bleached earless lizard makes in white sand,
the tracks my fingers make on your skin.
I see a spectrum of origami cranes
strung on thread at a Kurashiki temple,
Manchurian cranes in a cage and a salt
sumo ring. Papyrus stalks arc
